It’s hard to talk about Richie Mehta’s Phoolan without first talking about Bandit Queen and Arundhati Roy. In 1994 in India, writer Arundhati Roy was invited to the screening of Bandit Queen. Directed by Shekhar Kapur and written by Mala Sen (adapting her own biographical book, India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi), the film made a claim to absolute truth as it painted a picture of Phoolan Devi, a bandit turned politician. The real-life Phoolan Devi gained notoriety for being a part of a gang that would rob higher-caste villages, and for punishing her rapists and evading capture by authorities; people of lower castes praised her because she boldly stood up against caste-based and gender-based violence. Devi was charged in absentia in the early-’80s for the Behmai massacre, wherein 20 high-caste men were allegedly shot and killed by her gang under her command. She claimed she wasn’t there, but was nevertheless hunted by the police until her surrender in 1983. She served 10 years in prison for the massacre; upon her release, she became a politician. She was assassinated in 2001 at the age of 38.
Kapur’s film spun the myth that much of Devi’s bandit career was in response to being raped by various men into an unassailable claim of truth, visually depicting her as the murderer during the Behmai massacre. Roy’s complaint against the film was that it put Devi’s life at risk because it passed “judgments that ought to be passed in Courts of Law.” As “Bandit Queen claims nothing less than ‘Truth’” and as it depicts the woman as the active murderer, it also and primarily depicts her as the perpetual victim of rape, with every one of her actions being a reaction to violence. The film is difficult to watch because every few minutes Devi is being raped by one man or another. Indeed, Phoolan Devi herself claimed that the film was misleading and subsequently took the film to court. Roy writes in Mother Mary Comes to Me that her issue with Bandit Queen isn’t one about freedom of speech so much as it is about consent: Kapur’s film, in its belabored depictions of Devi’s rapes, a woman still alive at the time of the film’s release, violates the woman all over again, but also preemptively works to evade criticism by virtue of its claims of “truth.”
Mehta’s Phoolan, in comparison and perhaps in reaction to Roy’s and others’ responses in the ‘90s to Bandit Queen, makes no claims toward truth. In fact, Mehta’s film almost defensively reins in its stride and claims fiction from its outset. There is a fearsomeness about this film, an unwillingness to offend that saps the story about a very vibrant and opinionated and rebellious person of its sting, leaving it feeling as though it doesn’t stand for anything. Where Kapur’s film incensed, Mehta’s feels forgettable. Phoolan takes place over the course of a 48-hour siege on a village in the Chambal region of India, immediately after the Behmai massacre. Devi and a handful of her comrades are hiding within the village as the police swarm the small area. At every turn, Devi outsmarts the heavily armed police, and as she works to get away, she recalls the years and days leading up to the siege. In snippets, we receive her story: how she went from a child standing up for her family to a young adult standing up for herself and other women.
Mehta and co-writer Anu Singh work off of Devi’s 1996 autobiography I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India’s Bandit Queen, and yet the film opens with a hefty disclaimer: “While the film is inspired from true events, characters, life stories and events have been fictionalised and dramatized creatively,” the disclaimer begins. It’s all well enough, until the disclaimer says that no dialogue, characters, or scenes in the film are “intended to offend the sentiments of any individual, caste, community, country, ethnicity, race, or religion, or to denigrate any institution, location, political party, or person living or dead.” And that the film’s makers have “the highest regard and utmost respect for the government authorities and law enforcement agencies including the police department.” It’s an intentional disclaimer that defangs Devi’s story — the story of a woman who was incendiary, offensive to many people, many men — and does itself a disservice. That’s not to say that disclaimers are in and of themselves a problem, but this particular one, in this particular film, feels odd, feels both sidesist, feels fearful, rendering a film about a renegade person underwhelming and milquetoast.
While Kapur’s film was cruel, Mehta’s film simply doesn’t feel strong enough to carry Devi’s story, which is a shame because it does succeed in making her feel like a fully-formed human rather than only an eternal victim. In having a disclaimer that positions the film as not intending to offend anyone, it extricates Devi’s story from society, ossifying it as if in a snow globe, rendering it as divorced from space and time, from any bearing in reality. While Kapur’s film hewed to truth as an ideal, Mehta’s film hews to very little at all — to both truth and fiction, to meaning and meaninglessness. In this way, a story that ought to embolden, that ought to incite passions, becomes something lackluster in Mehta’s hands. Phoolan Devi was a rebel, a renegade; she was bombastic and vivid and strong; she was offensive to tradition and custom; she was not palatable. And yet in Phoolan, her story becomes one not constructed with the explicit aim of not offending, carried in the same breath as a respect for government authorities, law enforcement agencies, and the police department, institutions that sanctioned and carried out a hysterectomy on Devi without her consent. These institutions wanted her blood, but are in Mehta’s film coddled. Phoolan Devi would be disappointed, to say the least, and so too should viewers.
Published as part of TIFF 2026 — Dispatch 5.
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